Some credit David T. Shaw as composer, but it is likely that Shaw initially commissioned Beckett to write the music to his lyrics, and a dispute arose when Beckett changed the lyrics. Interestingly, the lyrics were supposedly plagerized from Stephen Joseph Meany's poem Britannia, the Pride of the Ocean, written in 1842. See: http://memory.loc.gov/cocoon/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.200000004/default.html